Title: The Labyrinth: The Way Back

Author: Aviry Nolane

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Chapter 23 – Here comes Trouble

She lay awake all night under a cloud of confusion.

Truth be told, she was exhausted. Tonight she had cried for the first time since she had ended up in Jareth's Labyrinth for a second time.

She had cried for everything and everyone she knew and loved, for herself, for Bill, for the life she now had very little hope of returning to. She cried for her mother, for Toby, and for a stupid wish she had made when she was fifteen and remarkably stupid.

Truth be told, she cried for him too, though she didn't know why. She seemed to need to cry for everyone and everything that had touched her, and though he had done so in such a terrible way, she could not help feeling that he always would be and in fact always was, a part of her.

"I don't want to die," she said aloud to no one, "but if I stay here, I die either way."

'And,' she added mentally, 'according to Jareth, I die if I leave.'

Death was not seeming like the best of options to Sarah, as it never had before in the Underground, so instead she chose Door 4. The still elusive option of not-dying and not ending up some kind of royal concubine.

And so she thought herself into circles until her eyelids became so heavy that they pushed her into yet another night of dreamless sleep as the sun rose on the Labyrinth.

It wasn't as if the thought had never entered his mind before. It had, dozens of times in the past, perhaps even more. He had acted on his frustrations at first.

Being the kind of man he was had always gained him the affections of many a courtier.

He had embraced them all, women who reminded him of his darkness, of his passion, of his power.

He had felt dominant with them all, in control, the way he imagined he would have felt possessing her.

Her.

He had gone and thought it. He shook his head, as if trying to shake the offensive thought out to where it could not be remembered. When his plan did little to succeed but make his hair a fizzy mess, he tried to drown it in wine instead.

Unfortunately, all the wine did was cause him to remember.

Though he hadn't the stomach to think of it at the time, he of course realized that he knew all along, as he knew now, that with every one of them he had been trying to replace them with a memory of someone else, someone distant.

His Sarah, the woman he could never touch.

And hadn't it been her now and her all along that had evaded him, cursed him, sworn she would never be his?

He questioned the dancing bear on this subject, who remained as stoic as earlier, and he had no choice but to continue his lone meanderings.

She had foiled him from the start with her big doe eyes, pushed him to his limits and made him believe that maybe somehow she could feel something for him more than hatred. That she could see him as anything but a kidnapper of children and a monster.

He closed his eyes now, remembering the sweet feel of her mouth on his, her lips anticipating his every move, the soft heat rising from her when he had kissed her in the Aboveground.

Hadn't she been cruel then?

Hadn't she been able to see her own wickedness in that moment, in a world away from his?

He wanted her. He was sure of that now – as he had wanted her that night when they played the roles of George and Sarah so well, when she had climbed atop him in her peach fuzz room, and as he had wanted her when she was but a child.

She was intoxicating, his Sarah.

But he did not love her, and he knew this in his head as strongly as his body knew he needed her.

He wanted her to be his because she had denied him as no other woman ever could. And it was because of this that he vowed in his throne room only hours ago, as she stood only yards away, that he would never take her.

For all her cruelty, Sarah was an innocent. She embodied all that was good and bbeautiful in any world, above or below.

And he knew now what he had never known before. That he could never defile such a treasure, that it was something to be kept safely away from him.

He wanted her because she didn't want him, but moreso he respected her because she would not trust him.

'Yes,' he pledged to himself as the final droplets of wine slid towards him, 'I know what I will do with my darling Sarah.'

After all, who could ever trust such a man as he?